2 Strategies for Reframing to Make Positive Change

To create change, courageous leaders jump in and embrace the process as an opportunity. They also create the space for open communication and collaboration with their teams. In the previous three steps, you learned to recognize and release old baggage filled with toxic experiences that negatively undermine and denigrate relationships, and replace them with new meanings that positively uplift and inspire relationships — empowering a new sense of optimism and effectiveness.

Two more strategies for effectively managing change

4th Success Factor: The fourth skill, practice Co-creating Conversations® is a core to Conversational Intelligence. As a leader, you can begin to have “co-creating conversations.” Co-creating conversations are conversations that have the ability to release the past and open space for the future with others — psychological state of being that is powerful and transforms us.

Call to Action: Co-creating conversations means opening the space for new energy for co-creation with others. This is a space where you and others are open to think about what you don’t know, what you don’t know you don’t know, and to explore possibilities that you never thought about before.

5th Success Factor: The fifth skill is shaping stories. Having moved from a place of understanding, to challenging, to stepping out and releasing, to opening space for Co-creating Conversations, you have now mastered the most proactive and intentional skill of shaping the story of your team’s collective success. This is what visionary leaders and organizations do. It’s work you do with others, not on your own in isolation. And what you co-create together are “shared stories for success” that envision and make possible the fulfillment of WE.

Call to Action: Shaping stories is a call to action to realize how you shape the stories’ impact on how the future unfolds. Reflect every day in a conscious way on how you shape stories so that they are winning, inclusive, and appreciative. These conversations have the ability to reframe your view of the world, give you and others hope for the future, and enable you to see the best outcomes for all of us. Both meanings have the power to transform.

How You Label Determines How You See

Use conversational intelligence as a way to break from the past and create the future. Rather than thinking about situations as problems, see them as challenges and opportunities, and communicate this point of view in your conversations with others.

Until you challenge yourself to change old thinking and conversational habits, you will see little change from yesterday to today. Once you do — you will find you become a catalyst for change wherever you go and you will discover new energy appears around you for tackling big challenges and achieving the desired results and targets regardless of their size and difficulty.

Image courtesy of kraifreedom / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Judith E. Glaser is CEO of Benchmark Communications, Inc. and Chairman of The Creating WE Institute. She is an Organizational Anthropologist, and consults to Fortune 500 Companies. Judith is the author of 4 best-selling business books, including her newest, Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results (Bibliomotion, 2013) www.creatingwe.com; jeglaser@creatingwe.com or call 212-307-4386